From Joel Miller’s darned good book Bad Trip: How the War on Drugs Is Destroying America:

In the Islamic Ottaman Empire, tobacco smokers were on the outs. Murad the Cruel, who ruled the vast empire between 1623 and 1640, was particularly rough on tobagophiles and made smoking a capital offense.

Miller then cites the following passage from Ian Gatley’s book Tobacco:

Murad’s habit was to roam the streets of Constantinople in disguise, feigning an urgent craving for a smoke then beheading any good Samaritan who offered relief. Contemporary records indicate that he himself killed or had put to death . . . in excess of 25,000 suspected smokers. Murad’s exaple was followed in Persia, where merchants caught selling tobacco were executed by having motlen lead poured down their throats.

Miller correctly points out that today’s drug war informant system isn’t all that far removed from Murad. We’re not quite to beheading yet. But cops are more than happy to send a hot, youngish-looking woman into a high school, instruct her to use her sexuality to lure pot from love-struck kids, then send the kids away for five years for dealing on school property.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 7th, 2005 at 11:27 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.